not to be a trouble maker but......if we are going to really get into the paleo stuff, maybe someone(s) ought to have another look at Mann's paper. His statistics were suspect as i remember. for instance, i seem to remember he used, say, 4 EOFs as predictors. But he prescreened them and threw one away because it was not useful. then made a model with the remaining three, ignoring the fact he had originally considered 4 predictors. He never added an artifical skill measure to account for this but based significance on 3 predictors. Might not make any difference. My memory is probably faulty on these issues, but to be completely even handed we ought to be sure we agree with his procedures. best, tim

It's interesting how much evidence there is now that the Hockey Stick was known to be a problem. Perhaps readers can help collate a list of emails making this point.

Reader Comments (42)

Bish here is the article about THSI on the site of the major Dutch newspaper Trouw I linked to earlier, translated by me (instead of the google translate jibberjabber):http://www.trouw.nl/tr/nl/5151/Vincent-wil-zon/article/detail/3061581/2011/12/02/Klimaatclub-was-wel-erg-dom-bezig.dhtml

I read a fascinating book last week: The Hockey Stick Illusion by A.W. Montford, about how science is proving itself incredible and thereby not helping the climate debate.

Almost 500 pages in English and most of it about statistics. So it is no wonder little about this book can be found on the Dutch web, even though it was published half a year ago already. But how unjust!

Andrew Montford is a British climate sceptic. That gives you an idea of the general direction of this book. But in the end THSI is about something even more fundamental than the climate debate (or is that impossible and have I too become a roaming sceptic?). The book is almost a detective novel about science, about the knowledge onto which we build our future. About science discrediting itself, conniving with politics, and not seeing critics as necessary checks to correcting past work, but more like difficult bullies that are pestering you so you have to pester them back as much you can.

Those 500 pages are not easily condensed into 30 or 100 lines. They are too interesting for that. I therefore will occasionally come back to them in the coming time. But allow me to give you some crumbs which might tempt you to read Montford’s work for yourself. To start with I want to mention that I am not the only one recommending this book. Several climate scientists (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S._Fred_Singer, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_Curry ) recommend you to digest THSI.

Maybe this is a given, but: the book gets its title from a graph created by mainly Michael Mann, which shows the development of the earth’s temperature for the last thousand years. This graph is shaped like an (ice-) hockey stick: nine centuries of a straight line with small deviations and a sudden sharp uptick starting in 1900. The temperature rises due to the CO2 that humans have been injecting into the atmosphere since the industrial revolution, and at present it is warmer than at any time in the previous thousand years. That is what Mann and two colleagues want to convey with their graph, and it also is what the UN organisation the IPCC shouts from the rooftops, aided by Mann’s graph.

The hockey stick has become the ultimate symbol of the climate “alarmists”: scientists and politicians. And in the mean time also of all the climate sceptics. Therefore it is all the better that somebody performs a thorough check of this symbol.Five years ago Montford came across the work of Steve McIntyre and Ross McKintrick. Especially the first one started to wonder how Mann got his graph, after publication of the hockey stick in 1998. What data had he used, and what statistical analyses had he performed?Until then it was presumed that since the year 1000AD the climate had experienced a small ice age (around 1600), and a warmer period around 1300. Especially the disappearance of those warm middle ages in Mann’s graph was prominent, so now it could be said that the last decades have been warmer than ever before in the last thousand years.

Montford wrote his book about M&M’s search in 2009, and it had the significant subtitle ”Climate gate and the Corruption of Science”. Page after page Montford is able to show how McIntyre is being ignored, hindered and denounced while trying to check Mann’s findings. Not only by Mann himself but also by scientific journals and in the end also the IPCC.

Only after immense trouble and a lot of time do McIntyre and McKintrick get their hands on parts of the data that Mann and others are basing their conclusions on. There, where the exchange of knowledge and review are the norm in science, here they are being spastically frustrated. Also the software and the statistical methods are being kept secret for years.With a lot of effort and with much help from outside through McIntyre’s website Climateaudit.org M&M subsequently decipher the enigmas. And as a reader, you fall from one surprise into another. Data is unreliable, the mathematics is incorrect, criticism to all this is first loudly rejected and consequently silently acknowledged. If one thing sticks with you after reading THSI, it is that science is not supposed to work this way.

And no, the book does not prove, and does not proclaim, that the earth is not heating up. The red line in the hockey stick is the result of thermometer readings. That line goes up.But man oh man, how Mann and his numerous followers have done their ideas and their field a disservice. Without all their secrecy and mess-ups their sceptical opponents would have had a lot less ammunition.

So you've come up with a new topic to cover? How many times can you tell yourself the same story? Anyone who cares has made up his mind, no? They did it, really, they did. Here, let me show you. See, and here too. And here, see?

If Mann came clean and put the hockey stick to bed, what would you do with your life? It would be your worst nightmare come true. Are you competent to talk about the physics of climate? Mann's work is climate stamp collecting. He doesn't do climate science. If I keep a record of the temperatures at my house, do you think that would be science? You could erase Mann from history, and it wouldn't change climate science one iota. But it would ruin those skeptic blogs that live off his petty carcass.

I'm sure this has been spotted before but I was struck by something when I read this in email 0518 from a Met office guy :

a) Did Mann et al get it wrong? Yes Mann et al got it wrong. How wrong is still under debate and the ECHO-G/HadCM3 results may be over-exaggerating the variance loss for some model-specific reasons.

The thing that struck me was that this was in reaction to the Richard Muller article of October 2004, and it seems there were rumblings that the HS edifice might be crumbling.

Looking at that Muller article again it seems ever more amazing that Mann weathered the devastating analysis at the time. His paper hasn't got any stronger in the mean time. I bet it probably shocked Muller too that it didn't have more bite and put the skids on the increasing bandwagon.

It shows to me the power of the lobby that formed around Mann to maintain his reputation, and it shows the power of hitching your identity to such a narrow politically potent issue.

Sometimes people bang on about "climate scam" and the money schemes as if they alone motivate these scientists, but I think it misses the more prosaic fact that just acquiring and maintaining the public kudos of scientific respect in "the most important subject ever" is motive enough. I think that is the most damning ( and annoying to the believers ) thing about these emails, it shows up the plain old mucky, grubby level of maneouvering, that was/is needed to keep up this bogus shiny pure image.

I don't think MarkB really gets it. We've known for ages that the Hockey Stick was totally bogus.

What is new is that The Team knew it all along too. They just weren't prepared to admit it in public. It is amusing watching these revelations that they knew the sceptics had a point. Let us have our fun MarkB.

What is not amusing is the revelations that they were prepared to seriously damage the reputation of scientists who did not agree.

EDwithout the slightest doubt , I do wish to be involved in this AND/OR something like it -what I wanted to do (to be frank) myself, is to do a piece with you, Tim and Tom Melvin andJan(?) , on the validity of the low frequency components of the family of reconstructions -but with the emphasis on the tree-ring side . Tim is certainly (with me and you - remember)doing a paper for The Holocene on the areas of uncertainty in these attempts (focusing oncalibration issues, spatial representation of predictors (spatial and time scale bias),seasonal bias and relating these , ultimately. to the reliability of the reconstructions{This is my version of what will be in it but he may disagree} . The basic point is that I(and I think he) agree that Mike and Phil's latest contribution is a step backwards ( intime and understanding ) - well in reality I do not believe it is a step forward. I need toread you message in detail and then phone tomorrow (I HAVE to get this PhD report off toNew Zeland now) after talking to Tim . You know I desperately want to produce a newtemperature reconstruction from the various tree-ring data (and explore the Mann western USPC correction - though Malcolm has ignored my request for the data) . At the least , allthis requires that I come to see you (and perhaps Tim too).I WILL be in touch ....KeithAt 08:32 AM 9/3/03 -0400, you wrote:

Hi Keith,After the meeting in Norway, where I presented the Esper stuff as described in theextended abstract I sent you, and hearing Bradley's follow-up talk on how everybody buthim has fucked up in reconstructing past NH temperatures over the past 1000 years (thisis a bit of an overstatement on my part I must admit, but his air of papal infallibilityis really quite nauseating at times), I have come up with an idea that I want you to beinvolved in. Consider the tentative title:"Northern Hemisphere Temperatures Over The Past Millennium: Where Are The GreatestUncertainties?"Authors: Cook, Briffa, Esper, Osborn, D'Arrigo, Bradley(?), Jones (??), Mann(infinite?) - I am afraid the Mike and Phil are too personally invested in things now(i.e. the 2003 GRL paper that is probably the worst paper Phil has ever been involved in- Bradley hates it as well), but I am willing to offer to include them if they cancontribute without just defending their past work - this is the key to having anyoneinvolved. Be honest. Lay it all out on the table and don't start by assuming that ANYreconstruction is better than any other.Here are my ideas for the paper in a nutshell (please bear with me):1) Describe the past work (Mann, Briffa, Jones, Crowley, Esper, yada, yada, yada) andtheir data over-laps.2) Use the Briffa&Osborn "Blowing Hot And Cold" annually-resolved recons (plus Crowley?)(boreholes not included) for comparison because they are all scaled identically to thesame NH extra-tropics temperatures and the Mann version only includes that part of theNH (we could include Mann's full NH recon as well, but he would probably go ballistic,and also the new Mann&Jones mess?)3) Characterize the similarities between series using unrotated (maybe rotated as well)EOF analysis (correlation for pure similarity, covariance for differences in amplitudeas well) and filtering on the reconstructions - unfiltered, 20yr high-pass, 100-20bandpass, 100 lowpass - to find out where the reconstructions are most similar anddifferent - use 1st-EOF loadings as a guide, the comparisons of the power spectra couldalso be done I suppose4) Do these EOF analyses on different time periods to see where they differ most, e.g.,running 100-year EOF windows on the unfiltered data, running 300-year for 20-lp data(something like that anyway), and plot the 1st-EOF loadings as a function of time5) Discuss where the biggest differences lie between reconstructions (this will almostcertainly occur most in the 100 lowpass data), taking into account data overlaps6) Point out implications concerning the next IPCC assessment and EBM forcingexperiments that are basically designed to fit the lower frequencies - if the greatestuncertainties are in the >100 year band, then that is where the greatest uncertaintieswill be in the forcing experiments7) Publish, retire, and don't leave a forwarding addressWithout trying to prejudice this work, but also because of what I almost think I know tobe the case, the results of this study will show that we can probably say a fair bitabout <100 year extra-tropical NH temperature variability (at least as far as we believethe proxy estimates), but honestly know fuck-all about what the >100 year variabilitywas like with any certainty (i.e. we know with certainty that we know fuck-all).Of course, none of what I have proposed has addressed the issue of seasonality ofresponse. So what I am suggesting is strictly an empirical comparison of published 1000year NH reconstructions because many of the same tree-ring proxies get used in bothseasonal and annual recons anyway. So all I care about is how the recons differ andwhere they differ most in frequency and time without any direct consideration of theirTRUE association with observed temperatures.I think this is exactly the kind of study that needs to be done before the next IPCCassessment. But to give it credibility, it has to have a reasonably broad spectrum ofauthors to avoid looking like a biased attack paper, i.e. like Soon and Balliunas.If you don't want to do it, just say so and I will drop the whole idea like a hotpotato. I honestly don't want to do it without your participation. If you want to be thelead on it, I am fine with that too.Cheers,Ed

Thread on Judith Curry.s blog concerning the Hockey Stick and the CET record and the LIA by Tony Brown

http://judithcurry.com/2011/12/01/the-long-slow-thaw/

2 of the points in the conclusion

5) Lamb gathered together a variety of forms of evidence in his reconstruction. The schematic of composite graphs seen in figure 16 and 17 -when compared to the reconstruction to 1538- seems to confirm with other research that Lamb’s view of climate history was broadly correct. The main caveats we would place is that our own 1538 reconstruction seems to indicate slightly warmer humps around 1550 and 1630 than Lamb notes. This needs to be checked as it was unexpected

6) The hockey stick remains a potent icon to this day. However the gradual decline in temperatures over the centuries that it depicts cannot be detected, nor the lack of variability of the climate over the same time scales. The sharp uptick in temperatures from the start of the 20Th Century is a likely artifact of computer modeling through over complex statistical interpretation of inadequate proxies. Modern warming needs to be put into its historic context with the patterns of considerable natural climatic variability that can be observed from the past.

Surely loads of people knew the hockey stick was bunk... It is what made me a 'denier' when it was plastered all over the IPCC report, but I did have a Geology background before going into Meteorology/Climate research. The whole problem is everyone keeping silent while the money continued to roll in.

"And no, the book does not prove, and does not proclaim, that the earth is not heating up. The red line in the hockey stick is the result of thermometer readings. That line goes up."

What it does, along with a recent posting at Jeff Id's site ( Title: I can't hear you ) is shatter the notion that climate was stable until the recent time. The purpose of the hockey stick isn't to show that current temperatures are rising, the purpose is to show that past temperatures were stable until recently. As can be shown in the book and particularly at Jeff's posting, is that it greatly underestimates past variability. He includes an email from the latest Climate Gate 2 mails where this is brought to their attention by Bo Christiansen at DMI in Denmark. Please read that blog posting. It basically shatters an underlying thesis of the IPCC and the entire AGW argument. Climate was not stable, we have enough historical accounts to know that. But the "hockey stick" long flat handle is wrong. Just plain wrong.

MarkBPlease do tell us your understanding of "the physics" and we'll compare this with what is known from other sources.There seems to be rather too many holes in that bucket, "Dear Mark".Perhaps you can fill in the blanks that have evaded every other attempt.

I've never understood why someone would come into your home and insult you. In fact it is so rare an occurrence because most people have a built in courtesy that restrains them from doing so. Blogs however seem to attract those people who gain the courage from anonymity and are inexcusably ill-mannered. Their insults are always accompanied by huge doses of ignorance. In the case of the hockeystick, MarkB doesn't seem to understand that the hockeystick gave the environmentalists the opportunity to point to this era as unprecedented in history. That was the lie, and a lie that is still believed in political circles. That belief has led the UK to embark on a course of action which will add some 30% in green taxes to our energy bills, where to travel by aeroplane the actual cost is 1/3 of the taxes, where fuel at the pumps is at all time highs while oil is at relatively low levels in the wholesale markets. In addition the government is spending £18Bn/year to combat climate change, money that will be diverted from much better causes.

So no, the hockeystick doesn't prove warming it proves that we should be diverting vast amounts of money from helping humans to tinkering about trying to change the climate. A task which is akin to trying to make the tide stay out. Without the hockeystick the physics of climate change would not be able to make the case for action, there are too many uncertainties and it shouldn't need repeating, but I will. The behaviour of a coupled non-linear chaotic system (the climate) cannot be predicted, so they need past behaviour to bolster the vast uncertainties in the science.

If so many people knew it was bunk, why did not a single one of them have the spine to stand up and refute it? Scared of the mann/gore response one presumes. This is not science, it is industrial fraud.

Tim is certainly (with me and you - remember) doing a paper for The Holocene...

I really did like that bit. Briffa believes that Cook needs to be reminded that the two of them are doing a paper on the Holocene along with Tim (whichever Tim that would be)? What active lives these people lead that they can't even be trusted to remember who they're working with.Or does the rarefied atmosphere of academia have an as yet undiscovered mutative effect on the normal human brain causing a form of mental activity different from those who live in the real world down below?

RichardI can't answer for BH, but I will be "done with climate" when:- the environmental NGOs are firmly back in their boxes where they belong;- when the scientific activists are removed from their posts and those (perhaps like yourself) whose interest is the furtherance of science and not — what is in effect — a form of religion are the ones who are doing the research;- when self-serving creeps like Pachauri (I really can't think of a more polite description, sorry) are removed from any position of influence in relation to science;- and as a follow-up when the UN stops undermining science and scientific endeavour in an attempt to create a totalitarian world government;- when scientists understand that their work is being deliberately misused and misinterpreted by politicians and those self-same environmental NGOs to push socio-political agendas that are based on lies and distortions and that the vast majority of humanity have not signed up to nor ever would;- when scientists remember what the scientific method is and stop hiding their work and fudging their results in a field which affects every man, woman, and child on this earth;when the politicians stop lying about the effects that their policies will have on climate and accept that more taxation and the imposition of pointless restrictions on the behaviour of their people is going to have at best a marginal effect on climate.

Once we have all these in place and what I am hearing are facts and honestly-held opinions then I might believe that the time has come when we can move on to other concerns of more immediate concern to the human race — like civil liberties, poverty, genuine free trade, and a real concern for the environment.

Richard, I can't answer for our host, but you have to remember why some of us got involved in the climate wars in the first place.

For me this has never really been about climate itself. I don't find climate partcularly interesting; it's one of those worthy but tedious branches of science which under normal circumstances I would happily leave to other people who like that sort of thing. My whole involvement has always been driven by concerns about the corruption of science.

Like many people I was dragged into this by the Hockey Stick. I was looking up some minor detail about the Medieval Warm Period and discovered this weird parallel universe of people who apparently didn't believe it had happened, and even more bizarrely appeared to believe that essentially nothing had happened in the world before the twentieth century. The Hockey Stick is an extraordinary claim which requires extraordinary evidence, so I started reading round the subject. And it soon became clear that the first extraordinary thing about the evidence for the Hockey Stick was how extraordinarily weak it was, and the second extraordinary thing was how desperate its defenders were to hide this fact. I'd always had an interest in pathological science, and it looked like I might have stumbled across a really good modern example.

You can't spend long digging around the Hockey Stick without stumbling across other areas of climate science pathology. The next one that really struck me was the famous Phil Jones quote: "Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it". To any practising scientist that's a huge red flag. Sure we all feel a bit like that on occasion, but to actually say something like that in an email is practically equivalent to getting up on a public platform and saying "I'm a pathological scientist, and I'm proud."

Rather naively I initially believed that Phil Jones was just having a bad day and had said something really stupid. Surely he couldn't really think that was acceptable? And surely his colleagues would deal with him? But no, it turned out that this apalling quote was only the most quotable of several other remarks, and he really was trying to hide his data from people who might (horror of horrors) want to check his conclusions.

That's when I got involved in my FOI request. And consequently got exposed to the full horror of "big climate", as clear an example of politicised and pathological science as I have ever seen. And then came Climategate 2009, and "hide the decline". All downhill from there.

When will I be done with climate? Quite simply when it stops being a pathological science and starts acting according to the normal rules and conventions of scientific discourse. At that point I will, I'm afraid, simply lose interest in the whole business, and leave it to the experts to get on with their stuff, just as I leave most of the rest of science to the appropriate experts.

To put it another way, I will be done with climate once I can trust that Richard Betts can be left to do good work on his own. I absolutely trust you to get on with doing good stuff under normal circumstances. But I'm afraid I don't trust you to do good work under current pathological conditions, because you don't stand up against the all too obvious stench emanating from some of your colleagues.

For me the Hockey Stick was where it began, and probably where it will end (and I will daringly suggest that the same thing might be true for our host). The Hockey Stick is obviously wrong. Everybody knows it is obviously wrong. Climategate 2011 shows that even many of its most outspoken public defenders know it is obviously wrong. And yet it goes on being published and defended year after year.

Do I expect you to publicly denounce the Hockey Stick as obvious drivel? Well yes, that's what you should do. It is the job of scientists of integrity to expose pathological science, and it is especially the job of scientists in closely related fields. You should not be leaving this to random passing NMR spectroscopists who have better things to do. But I'm afraid I no longer expect you to do so. The opportune moment has, I think, passed. And that is why, even though we are all delighted to have you here, and all enjoy what you have to say, some of us get a trifle tetchy from time to time.

You ask us to judge you by AR5, and in many ways that is a reasonable request. Many of us will judge it by the handling of paleoclimate, not because this is all that important an aspect of the science, but rather because it is a litmus test of whether climate scientists are prepared to stand up against the bullying defenders of pathology in their midst. So, Richard, can I look forward to returning back to my proper work on the application of composite rotations to the performance of error-tolerant unitary transformations? Or will we all be let down again?

I think that the temperature hockey stick is broken, and everybody realises this. As we have discussed before, I think that the CO2 hockey stick deserves far more serious attention now - this is another "splice" of two different types of data (modern instruments and ice cores) - and my personal opinion is that I would rather trust the thousands of chemical measurements, which show a completely different picture.

If both hockey sticks were accepted to be broken the AGW hypothesis and the CAGW conjecture would fade away like the morning mist.

This list is incomplete - I will add the one you highlight here and the amazing sequence highlighted by Steve M recently where 'The team' discuss (in their attempt to rebut Soon et al) the fact that they know there are problems with many of the 'reconstructions' but are quite happy to put their names on the paper anyway. See Steve's thread Behind Closed Doors: “Perpetuating Rubbish”.

May I say that the post by Jonathan Jones is a superb statement on behalf of scientific standards and integrity! Some version of that needs to be put to every scientist and mathematician/statistician everywhere who will give it even a moment's attention. The corruption and pathology have gone on much too long and affected far too many lives (as though any such pathology was not already too much).

TomTim has just told me of your message expressing concern about the China series , andyour statement of the necessity to "deal with Ray's comment" and add in the "smalladjustment to the Figure Caption". .We (I and Tim) decided to get this off as soon as possible to Ellen (AGU) , as we hadbeen asked to do (and as requested by Ellen). Hence it went off earlier today (andbefore your message arrived). Mike was aware of Ray's comment and was happy to leave anyamendment to the text "until the proof stage" .

YEAH, I REALIZE THIS -- AND I AGREE THAT IT WAS IMPORTANT TO GET THE DOCUMENT OFFQUICKLY.

In my opinion it is not practical (or desirable) to try to "qualify " any one record inthis limited format. It was a majority decision to leave the Mann and Jones 2000-yearseries in the Figure 1 (as it was to remove the Briffa and Osborn tree-ring based one) ,and the details of the logic used to derive the Mann and Jones series is to be found inthe (cited) text of their paper.

YOU MISUNDERSTAND ME. OF COURSE IT WOULD BE SILLY TO SINGLE OUT A SPECIFIC ITEM. WHAT ISNECESSARY IS A SENTENCE STATING THE *METHOD* -- I.E., THAT ITEMS ARE WEIGHTED BY THEIRCALIBRATION PERFORMANCE.Signing on to this letter , in my mind.

implies agreement with the text and not individual endorsement of all curves by eachauthor. I too have expressed my concern to Phil (and Ray) over the logic that you leaveall series you want in but just weight them according to some (sometimes low)correlation (in this case based on decadal values). I also believe some of the seriesthat make up the Chinese record are dubious or obscure , but the same is true of otherrecords Mann and Jones have used (e.g. how do you handle a series in New Zealand thathas a -0.25 correlation?) .

IT IS A DIFFICULT CALL -- WHETHER TO DUMP SERIES THAT HAVE NO SIGNIFICANT LINK TOTEMPERATURE AND WHICH ARE, AS WELL, DUBIOUS ON A PRIORI GROUNDS; OR TO USE A WEIGHTINGSCHEME. IF ONE DID THIS BY SIMPLE MULTIPLE REGRESSION, THEN THINGS WOULD BE WEIGHTEDAUTOMATICALLY. HOWEVER, STATISTICALLY ONE SHOULD STILL DUMP THE LOW CORRELATION ONES.I HAVE RESERVATIONS ABOUT WHAT MIKE AND PHIL HAVE DONE -- BUT THIS IS SOMETHING WESHOULD TALK ABOUT FACE TO FACE SOME DAY.Further serious problems are

still (see my and Tim's Science comment on the Mann 1999 paper) lurking with thecorrection applied to the Western US tree-ring PC amplitude series used (and shown inFigure 2). There are problems (and limitations ) with ALL series used.

YEAH.At this stage , singling out individual records

for added (and unavoidably cursory added description) is not practical.

I AM NOT SUGGESTING THIS -- AS THE ABOVE SHOULD MAKE CLEAR.

We were told to cut the text and References significantly - and further cuts are impliedby Ellen's messages to us.If you wish to open this up to general discussion , it may be best to wait 'til theproof stage and then we can all consider the balance of emphasis - but we had alsobetter guard against too "selective" a choice of data to present? If you want to get asomewhat wider discussion of this point going in the meantime , feel free to forwardthis to whoever you wish along with your disagreement , while we wait on the responsefrom AGU.

NO -- I'M HAPPY WITH KEEPING THINGS AT THIS LEVEL.

Best wishesKeith

I WAS AT A MEETING IN BRECKENRIDGE YESTERDAY WHERE SUSAN SOLOMON GAVE AN HOUR LONGPRESENTATION ABOUT PLANS FOR THE 4AR WG1 REPORT, DUE OUT IN 2007. IT WAS A COMPREHENSIVETALK -- AND SHE HAS THINGS MUCH BETTER ORGANIZED THAT JOHN HOUGHTON EVER DID. SHE DIDSINGLE OUT TREE RINGS AS A VITAL COMPONENT OF THE PALEO RECORD.

To me, apart from the extravagant waste of money when we can least afford it, the worst thing about the CAGW fiasco is the damage done to the reputation of science. It enjoyed high status in our society because of the cautious claims made, and its self-correcting nature. That one minor scientific discipline went off the rails is one thing, but what was particularly bad is that it wasn't condemned by scientists in other fields. Even the Royal Society gave its blessing to this nonsense, and played a part in the coverup of ClimateGate 1.0. I would also note that there is already a good noun in English for 'pathological science', and that is Lysenkoism. This is precisely what we are seeing now.

Superb writing by Joanathan Jones (Dec 3, 2011 at 6:11 PM). I am sorry I missed this until now, but I am very glad to have read it. I like to think there will be many more like him who will speak their truth through gritted teeth, furious at the distraction from their own work but determined to chip away at the pernicious nonsense they see over in the climate field. I have often wondered at the distraction it has cause genuine climate scientists such as Prof Lindzen. He has spoken out lucidly and calmly and patiently for some 20 years about the lack of substance in the alarmist case. The climate charlatans remain at large. I fear we do need many more scientists from other fields to read up on climate physics, and other areas, and let the world hear their insights loud and clear. As for Richard Betts, who came here perhaps to explain everything to those of us still in the dark, I like to think the light shone here upon his work and his words will be beneficial to him in the long run.